An open, constantly evolving space for artistic exploration. A team effort involving women artists and non-artists who carry out their activities in Spain and from a feminist perspective, addressing situations and problems unique to their condition. These are women who have worked and continue to work in alternative settings. Feminine-Visual hopes to lead to the development of new visual and creative languages, a language for women generated within the female world as it relates to the country where we live.

The proposed platform for this space is expositional in nature: four shows accompanied by round-table forums, projections and performances that will take place over the course of a year and will culminate in a presentation of all the projects at a single final event. The spaces for these projects will vary according to the exhibition, and will include both artistic and non-artistic spaces.

The visual construction of gender identity or sexual orientation constitutes a huge void in the domain of women. This profound silence becomes terrifying if we stop to consider what women artists have produced concerning this subject just within our own country. By this we mean the absence of representations dealing with everyday situations typical to our condition and origin, or problems that many women face on a day-to-day basis, such as male chauvinism, sexual violence, domestic violence, breast cancer, or the fact that lesbians do not have penises but do have sex, or the significance that fertility treatments have in a woman’s life, or the not advantageous but rather discriminatory fact that lesbians are not considered to be homosexual, but two men can be, or that there is thorough documentation of the repression of male homosexuality, whereas female homosexuality seems never to have existed, or that the lesbian world has been highly psychologized, psychiatrized and perhaps even destroyed.

In many cases, feminist artistic visions of gender identity seem to dwell on the idea that such a problematic does not exist, that what truly governs women’s lives is the universal and integrated, while at the same time celebrating a culture of parity and entering commercial museums and galleries with a neutral visual discourse, or at the most, questioning social roles, as if entering into that debate might alter their own superficial handling of their world.

Perhaps it would be easier to participate in the ritual of success if we could find a way to camouflage all those differences, as if they had never existed. Perhaps women were the ones to determine the best way to halt discrimination and the overshadowing of the personalities of thousands of other women. Isn’t it odd that many women artists have a discourse absent of gender, absent of any interest in problems specific to women, a universal and definitively politically correct discourse? Is the debate over gender roles and the socialization of men and women perhaps something revolutionary that justifies the lack of depth in any investigation into other issues?

Could it be that this superficial treatment of women’s issues has deeper roots? With the involution of women’s status in Spain after the fall of the Second Republic and the victory of the Franquist dictatorship, however much or little that women achieved disappeared, and it wasn’t until the transition of 1978 that they became equal citizens with the same rights as men. How does this historic reality affect women’s art? We need to look inward to discover our realities and limitations, to stop seeing other situations as if they were our own, and to begin creating some awareness of our own situation.

Feminine Visual is a work space that welcomes different approaches to the female universe that focus on specific issues. Participating artists address the topic from the point of view of immigrants, gays, business owners… always reflecting the relationship with their surroundings and assuming their origins and identities, while using artistic resources to denounce, reveal, sensitize and share a space with collectives or individual women who use their own tools, which are different from those of art, to contribute to the creation of this project.

Feminine-Visual is envisioned as a project in a constant state of growth designed to make a new contribution to the construction of women’s identity in Spanish art, and thus we extend an invitation to other women to form part of this space of creation.